Residential gateways, also known as home gateways, are termination devices for connecting consumer networks to a broadband network. Such consumer networks are typically LANs (Local Area Networks) at homes but also at offices or in vehicles. As “residential” gateways are not limited to residential settings, the broader term gateways will be used in this document. A gateway typically couples two network domains which do not share the same domain management, such as an office domain and a public network operator domain.
Over the years, the number of services provided by consumer networks has increased, which has caused an increase in the complexity of gateways. This increased complexity has resulted in increased costs for the network operators who provide the gateways to their customers and are generally responsible for the maintenance of the gateways.
The article by T. Cruz et al., “An Architecture for Virtualized Home Gateways”, IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM 2013), discloses the concept of virtualizing residential gateways: splitting a gateway into a relatively simple hardware device at the home network and a remote software application at another network, for example the telecommunication operator network. This concept allows the physical device coupled to the consumer network to be much simpler, and hence less expensive, while allowing most software updates to be carried out in the telecommunication operator network, even without involving the hardware device at the consumer's premises.
It is noted that the relatively simple gateway device at the home network mentioned by Cruz may be referred to as a simplified bridge or a bridged residential gateway device.
The concept of a virtualized residential gateway tacitly assumes that the two parts of the residential gateway are permanently, and perfectly, coupled, allowing the two parts to exchange data at all times. However, in practice this is sometimes not the case, as the data link between the physical device and the remote software application may not always be available or even fail for an extended period of time. Also, the remote software application may not always be available, for example due to a server error. As a consequence, the communication between devices in the home or local network may be lost. This limits the practical applications of virtualized residential gateways.
United States Patent Application US 2008/0069121 discloses a residential gateway configured for the virtual gateway model and operable to allow continued operation of target devices if communication with the remote server is interrupted. To allow this, the gateway known from US 2008/0069121 has many additional functions and is therefore much more complicated, and requires more resources, than originally intended in the virtual residential gateway model.